Did life exist on Mars? This question is asked by all astronomers of the Earth. In search of a clue, in 2011 in Russia, the Phobos-Grunt interplanetary station was launched from Baikonur. She was intended to explore the Martian soil for the possibility of life on Mars. However, the launch was unsuccessful, the station burned down while still in the dense layers of the Earth's atmosphere.
This was far from the first satellite sent to the Red Planet. So, in 1960, the first Soviet satellite was sent to Mars from Baikonur, but it also burned up in the atmosphere, and did not fly out of the Earth's orbit. Experts then determined that the accident was related to engine breakdown. Following him, the next three launched space stations overtook the same fate.
Failures with satellites followed one after another both in the USSR and in the USA, as if some reasonable external force was systematically destroying the launched space stations. The interplanetary station Mars-1 flew closest to the planet on June 19, 1963, but it also exploded when approaching the outer layers from a sudden gas leak in the orientation system. Launched next in 1964, the improved interplanetary automatic station of the space program Mars Zond-2 was unable to deploy its solar panels and simply disappeared. Another probe managed to land on Mars, and twenty seconds later the video signal disappeared.
The US satellite Mariner 4 flew right up in 1965 and took the first low quality image of the Red Planet with poor resolution. But it was this interplanetary station that discovered that Mars lacks a global magnetic field capable of protecting the planet from deadly cosmic rays. Mariner 4 also found that no less than eighty percent of Mars' atmosphere is carbon dioxide. The next American satellite, Mariner-9, reached the orbit of Mars in 1971 and sent more than seven thousand high-quality photographs of the planet's landscape to Earth.
The American interplanetary station Viking was sent to Mars in 1968. She was to scan the upper layers of the planet. The very first pictures amazed scientists. Ancient ruins with austere architecture were clearly visible in them. Nature does not create such very flat structures. Examples on Earth are such ruins of ancient Roman architecture as Pompeii, the Colosseum, arched aqueducts. Later, space images came with black deep wells on the surface, with parallel lines covered with red dust, similar to abandoned railways. Especially attracted the attention of the lines of the overground metro in the form of giant "shiny worms" in places going inward to the surface and re-emerging outside.
In 2005, the NASA MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) interplanetary multifunctional automated station was launched from the Cape Canaveral launch space complex. The following year, she sent in her first high-resolution photographs. However, the station's instrumentation soon began to malfunction. 2009 brought a new hardware problem with four unexpected and unexpected software restarts. As a result, the station was shut down for four months. The engineers never found the cause of the problem, so they replaced the software.
Only fifty years after the beginning of the study, in 2012, the six-wheeled American robot Curiosity (Curiosity means curiosity) was planted on Mars. The rover has a spectrometer on board that can analyze carbon isotopes that could leave living things on the Red Planet. In real time, images from the rover's cameras were processed on a satellite connected to it in Mars orbit and transmitted to Earth. The robot did a number of studies, and once burned out the Martian soil with a laser. Immediately one of its main working units refused to work. Despite this incident, the spacecraft, which is an autonomous chemical laboratory, continues to work according to the Mars program to the present day.
Deciphering the data obtained from the rovers, scientists discovered in the relief of the surface of Mars objects of the correct shape, which can be called pyramids. And in one of the photographs, a mountain range is even clearly visible, resembling the face of a sphinx from above, whose gaze is turned to the Earth. A little later, in April 2012, an object in the form of a perfect parallelepiped was found in other MRO photographs. Could it be a portal to the world of hidden Martian depths? There is a debate among astronomers about the artificial or natural origin of these stone objects.
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There is only one percent oxygen in the atmosphere of Mars, high radiation. The planet's landscape is represented by dry canyons, huge stone volcanoes, a lifeless desert surface, a red veil of dust storms. The average temperature on the planet is minus fifty degrees. The launch of a manned spacecraft to the Red Planet with astronauts on board is scheduled for 2030. Of course, such an expedition will be specially equipped, with enhanced protection measures from the planet's increased radiation and chemical elements contained in the soil that can cause rapid corrosion of space suits. Special domes erected there will allow colonies of astronauts to settle in, and protect them from such unbearable living conditions.
Thirty of the thirty-nine spacecraft sent to Mars were destroyed. With the equipment sent there, all the time there are some ridiculous refusals in work, which has not happened in other directions of spacecraft launch. Perhaps an automated shield remains from the ancient Martian civilization that destroys any alien bodies that invade the orbit of the Red Planet. Then this could explain the reason for the disappearance of most of the spacecraft launched from Earth to Mars. The final answer to the eternal question about the presence of reason on the Red Planet in the future will be given only by the testimony of eyewitnesses who set foot on its surface.